Former police chief Simon Overland has been forced to accept gangland lawyer Nicola Gobbo was recruited to help net her client, drug cartel boss Tony Mokbel.
Mr Overland, who joined Victoria Police as a commissioner from the federal police in 2003, is giving evidence for the second day at the royal commission investigating the force's use of the former barrister as Informer 3838.Mr Overland maintains that he did not believe, or was not told by detectives that Ms Gobbo provided information about her own clients.
But in a lively exchange at the commission on Tuesday morning, counsel assisting the inquiry Chris Winneke, QC, said it was illogical that Mr Overland did not know about Ms Gobbo's role.He said Mr Overland told detectives Ms Gobbo was not to act as a lawyer for the same criminals she had provided information to police about, when that was the very reason she was recruited.
"My understanding was that she was around that time providing information about other members of the Mokbel syndicate and the intention, as I understood it, was not to go directly at Mokbel at that time but to work around him and take out those around him and build a case against him that way," Mr Overland said.Victoria Police's use of Ms Gobbo's information has led to one conviction being quashed and several more put in serious doubt.
Despite Mr Overland’s warning to detectives, Ms Gobbo represented Mokbel in 2006 before he fled to Greece days ahead of his trial. She also represented one of Mokbel's drug cooks after providing information that led to his arrest."I thought it [the warning] was clear – these are very senior experience detectives I thought they knew what they were doing," he said.
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